Musical celebration of love has no specific season or date. But given that Valentine’s Day does fall on Sunday this year, the Vancouver Cantata Singers decided on a concert with the Vancouver-based Bergmann Piano Duo, anchored by Johannes Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes.

Brahms worked hard at his music and is normally considered sober and serious, yet he certainly had a more tender side, which is brought to the fore in the charming miniatures that make up the Liebeslieder. Brahms probably thought of them as high-grade domestic fare, the sort of things musical friends might turn to for an informal evening of congenial music making. A clue to this domestic focus is the use of piano, four hands, with its coy suggestiveness: the single piano bench means proximity and with that comes a significant romantic frisson, rather daring back in the day of chaperones and proper Victorian behaviour.

Marcel and Elizabeth Bergmann travel the globe performing works for two pianos; I wondered if being asked to play music for four hands might possibly be just a bit too close for comfort?

“We are married after all, and do actually enjoy it,” said Marcel Bergmann, “but we started on two pianos.”

When the pair decided to give Schubert’s wonderful Fantasy for piano four hands a go, there were things to be worked out. “We had quite a lot of trouble arranging ourselves physically.”

Liebeslieder is as much a joy for performers as it is for audiences, but it’s not without its occasional shadows. Marcel Bergmann draws attention to Brahms’s own sometimes complicated emotional life, noting that his much admired mentor Robert Schuman had previously composed some similar works.

“They must have had quite an influence on this piece,” he said. “And when the Liebeslieder were premiered, Brahms was at the keyboard with Schumann’s widow, Clara.”

On its own, Liebeslieder doesn’t make up a full program. There is also a short piece by New York-based John Corigliano. Elizabeth Bergmann is impressed by how Corigliano gets so much out of so few words — “I love you” repeated over and over with varied emphases.

According to Paula Kremer, artistic director of Cantata Singers, “The choir finds the piece virtuosic, theatrical, and even a bit ridiculous. The tenors may feel differently, as according to Corigliano, the joke is on them. They are always late, or composed with their entry rhythmically accentuating the ‘I’ in ‘I love you’ by sustaining it far longer than the other voice parts.”

Also on tap is John Greer’s Liebesleid-Lieder (a bilingual pun, replacing lied, the German word for song, with leid, meaning pain and/or suffering), a contemporary take on love by the peripatetic Winnipeg-born composer.

“Greer’s piece is a suite of 15 songs on satirical and whimsical texts, most by Dorothy Parker, conceived as a modern answer to the Brahms,” Kremer said. “It covers all the foibles of love and romance, both the good and the ugly sides of love, with truth and farce. Described as ‘acerbic,’ the poems can be cheeky and funny. At the end, though, Greer suddenly surprises the listener with a message that is both thought-provoking and sincere.”

As perhaps befits a contemporary meditation on love, Greer writes a whole anthology of dances, beginning with a waltz and ending with a Viennese Ländler. In between, however, there is everything from a charleston and a foxtrot to ragtime, a tango, rumba, bolero, and traditional neo-Baroque dances — a sarabande, pavane and a minuet. Marcel Bergmann called the results “Humorous — and very sly.”

Kremer agreed. “It’s a hoot at rehearsals to ask the choir to sing titles like ‘The sex situation,’ or say ‘And now let’s all sing ‘Monogamy’ together!”

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